smelled new and strange and the ladder still had protective grease on it.
‘Why can’t we have Joe?’ Ben Gallacher said.
‘Ask Himmler,’ said Carter. ‘You’ve asked me ten times. It’s not the fuses, they can’t trace the fault.’
‘What am I, then?’ said Gallacher. ‘Am I the bloody Flight Engineer or the tea-boy? Why aren’t I consulted?’
‘Can’t you get it into your thick head? The kite’s duff. For Christ’s sake stop binding, you’re making me jumpy.’
‘I want to fly in Joe for King,’ said Gallacher.
Collins, the bomb aimer on his last operation, reached into the inside pocket of his battledress blouse and found a piece of chalk. He climbed up two rungs of the ladder and, leaning to one side, he wrote ‘Joe for King’ across the squadron letter. Under that he scribbled just a huge curling moustache.
‘Now you are flying in Joe for King,’ said Tommy Carter, ‘get in and bloody well belt up.’ Gallacher swung round and aimed a punch at his captain. The punch sounded very loud and it was followed by a shocked silence. Tommy didn’t respond at all; he’d taken the blow on his thick harness and it hurt Gallacher’s hand more than Tommy’s chest.
Joe for King’s navigator was Roland Pembroke, a public-school-educated twenty-year-old from Edinburgh. Watching the two men growling at each other he was filled with a despairing horror. The engineer and pilot had never got on well together; Gallacher had failed the pilot’s course and was still jealous of the ones that hadn’t. Tommy, on the other hand, had that exasperating calm rectitude that only policemen display. Roland Pembroke had done everything he could think of to bring the two men closer. He turned to the Corporal rigger and asked in a whisper, ‘Did you get it?’
‘It will be waiting; that bird Cynthia in the Bell is saving me a bottle.’
‘And cups,’ said Roland Pembroke in his soft lowland accent.
‘Glasses,’ said the Corporal. ‘She’s promised to wangle me some glasses.’
‘Great,’ said Roland.
‘And I’ve got sausage rolls too.’
Roland pushed his navigational gear into the door of the plane and heaved a sigh of relief. Tomorrow was Sergeant Carter’s twenty-first birthday and the completion of ‘Tapper’ Collins’ final operation. Roland Pembroke had planned a surprise party right there on the pan so that the ground-staff boys and the crew could celebrate. It had started badly.
‘Ten trips done, twenty to go,’ said Pembroke as he disappeared into the aeroplane, crossing his fingers to stave off danger as he always did.
There are many ways in which the life history of an aircrew can be charted. There would be a simple graph of the odds that an insurance company would offer. The chances on this one began low – the first three trips were five times as dangerous as the average. But as skills and experience mounted so the chances of survival for each trip became better. Another graph, thirty trips with a five-per-cent casualty rate, would be a simple straight line: a mathematical proposition in which each trip held equal danger and the line ended at trip number twenty. There was yet another graph that could be drawn, a morale line charted by psychiatrists. Its curves recorded the effect of stress as men were asked to face repeatedly the mathematical probability of death. This graph – unlike the others – began at the highest point. Granted courage by ignorance and the inhibitory effect that curiosity has upon fear their morale was high for the first five operations, after which the line descended until a crack-up point was reached by the eleventh or twelfth trip. Perhaps it was the relief of surviving the thirteenth operation that made the graph turn upwards after it. Men had seen death at close quarters and were shocked to discover their own fear of it. But recognizing the same shameful fears in the eyes of their friends helped their morale, and after a slight recovery it remained constant until about the twenty-second trip, after which it sloped downwards without recovery.
The eleventh trip was not marked by crews asking to be taken off flying, getting drunk or running sobbing through the Mess. In fact few men asked to be grounded, and their reluctance was fortified by the RAF authorities who would stamp the words ‘lack of moral fibre’ across the man’s documents, strip him of rank and brevet and send him away in disgrace with the bright unfaded blue patch of tunic proclaiming him an officially recognized coward.
No, the eleventh trip was marked by more subtle defensive changes in the crew: a fatalism, a brutalizing, a callousness about the deaths of friends and a marked change in demeanour. Noisy men became quiet and reflective while the shy ones often became clamorous. This was the time at which the case histories of ulcers, deafness, and other stress-induced nervous diseases that were to follow the survivors through their later years, actually began. The crew of Joe for King were on their eleventh trip.
The crew of The Volkswagen, on the other hand, were about to do their first trip. Like a young man with his first sports car they were keen and raring to go. They weren’t tired in the way that Lambert was tired, their reflexes were sharp, their eyesight keen, and their hands itched to prove themselves. Lambert was like a weary old businessman climbing into his family saloon to do a trip that he had done all his working life. He was tired, dulled, slow of reflex, and frightened. And yet, as any insurance company will tell you, it’s the old men in family saloons who pay the least insurance and the kids in new sports cars who die.
Pilot Officer Cornelius Fleming sat at the controls of The Volkswagen and tried to hide his pleasure and excitement. He heard the boys making nervous jokes but he was determined to put on a show of bored indifference for the ground crew. One of the riggers, a gruff-spoken cockney, came into the cockpit with a tin can.
‘Here’s your tin, sir,’ he said.
‘What’s that for?’ said Fleming. He closed his eyes in a mannerism that at medical school had affected concentration.
‘To take a leak,’ said the rigger.
Fleming suspected he was being made the butt of a joke and looked at the man suspiciously.
The rigger grinned. ‘Do you want to put it under the seat?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ said Fleming and sighed.
‘Suit yourself, guv,’ said the rigger and walked back through the plane. He climbed down on to the ground and threw the can away under the ash trees. That was the trouble with officers, you could never tell them anything. That pansy-faced sprog officer had looked at him like he was offering dirty postcards to a bishop. The only crew here with three officers in it, and he had to be assigned to them. No matter, they wouldn’t last long, the poor sods. Zebra was a real duff kite and no matter about cleaning it up and calling it some foreign name, it was just a matter of time before it fell apart at the seams.
Fleming knew that he’d upset the fellow and he cursed himself for his handling of the business, even if it had been a legpull. Becoming a good skipper was the most difficult thing in the world, and the most desirable. At one time all he’d sought of God was a pilot’s brevet. Then he’d fastened his desire upon a commission. But it was all so difficult; a good skipper must be an expert pilot, a classless gentleman, a democratic commander and, most impossible of all, an intrepid leader who kept his men safe. Always there was this damned class business. That chap would merely have grinned if an NCO had called his bluff about the tin. It was all right for Lambert; these chaps with a gong and a tour behind them could do no wrong in the eyes of their crew.
‘Bertie!’
